68 On the Importance of 
subjected during peace. The hardships, 
dangers, and losses, inseparable from military 
service, need not be recounted ; but no defini- 
tion of national independence has ever yet 
been received, which implies that this inde- 
pendence is lost as soon as a nation is obliged 
to go to war. An attachment to the cause 
in which the soldier perishes, often consoles the 
affliction of surviving friends. In the same 
manner, if we resign our foreign commerce 
in an honourable cause, the immediate suffer- 
ers, if their patriotism is ardent, will receive, 
in the general advantages secured to their 
country, some consolation for their personal 
distresses ; and the nation at large may, with- 
out any want of sympathy for the disappointed 
merchant, reckon such evils necessary for the 
public interest. The merits of every parti- 
cular case are a fair subject of inquiry: but 
they are foreign to the present argument. 
It may however be laid down as a very mode- 
rate assumption, that the losses of the mer- 
chant ought to be as easily. consoled, as the 
calamity often sustained in the death of valued 
friends. 
The disadvantages arising from the loss 
of foreign commerce, do not bear so close an 
analogy to the common calamities of war, as 
they do to evils of much inferior magnitude. 
